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It will be nice to see how different mobile platforms can handle this test or actually part of it. If nothing else it will be guite suitable for feature check in tool. Allso it will interesting to see how different OS platforms can handle this compared to those Egypt test and other "game" like test that are out there.Reply

I wish they did that. However that would likely require a big rewrite of the engine, so much so that the scores may not be comparable to PCs. I really do wish there was a test like that for consoles though. Reply

Don't forget that consoles are now very old hardware -- DX9 era. Even a very basic graphics chip is already substantially faster than an Xbox 360 or PS3. Of course, writing code that works optimally on a wide range of hardware is part of the difficulty of PC gaming, which is why even with inferior graphics hardware the Xbox and PS3 can still look decent -- but nowhere near what a midrange GPU can manage, of course.Reply

The Xenos was something of a prototype DX10 chip, or at least halfway between fixed function DX9 chips and DX10. It had tessellation and unified shaders before any shipping graphics card, for instance. Reply

You can actually do tessellation with DX9 -- it was one of those features listed way back in the day. The hardware just wasn't really fast enough to make it practical. (And technically, displacement mapping isn't as "good" as the stuff you can do with DX11 -- or DX10 I suppose.) But really, no one is interested in benchmarking consoles I don't think, at least not Futuremark. They are what they are, and whether one console is faster or slower doesn't matter -- it's the games that dictate which console you should go with.Reply

I know it wouldn't be worth it for a company to develop that, as you would only need to benchmark one of each console and no one would buy it. It's just a vague interest I have. The hardware seems antiquated, but it constantly surprises me with how far they can push it, although a large part of that must be how much they have to optimize around consoles to get things to run well on them. But there are some unique things about them, ie the 360 having a crazy amount of SIMD registers (4 floats x 128 registers x 6 registers banks = 12K of registers) and the eDRAM with incredibly low latency to the GPU (why don't GPU makers do that? Haswells integrated gpu may be the first to it). Reply

They should focus on making 720p and 1080p higher bitrate. Bitrate > resolution at this point. But I guess a few showcase 4k videos take less bandwidth on their part than all the 1080p videos being higher bitrate. Reply

No argument against that from me. :D Watching 720p/1080p is still better than 240p - 480p on Youtube, but the quality isn't good enough that I would ever consider paying for anything. They will probably up the bitrate at some point.Reply

Part of the OC community loves the fact that the new 3DMark should scale awesomely with GPU power. But some of us are also a bit miffed that there is no 'story' in the benchmark. 3DMark Vantage had a story, like Jane Nash, or the earlier 3DMarks with Deep Freeze and the other one with the monster jumping over the airship. Unigine Heaven and now the new 3DMark seems a little off in terms of 'story'.Reply

I just wish they could make an actual game using their tech -- and a good game, for that matter. Benchmarking stuff people don't actually use, other than for benchmarking, isn't as useful as real-world gaming tests in my book.Reply

They did make a game with their tech: Shattered Horizon. The concept was basically a zero-G "realistic" arena shooter. It was an interesting concept, but it didn't lend itself to much variety and never really caught on.

Since then Rovio bought Futuremark's game studio. It's a shame, since I would have liked to see them take on a space game (given what they did with 3DMark 05 and Vantage)

And I completely agree on the desire to see more story-like benchmarking. 3D Mark 05 was especially fun; they even had a Poets of the Fall song in the credits. I ran that in demo mode more than I ever ran it in benchmark mode.Reply

But in the light of the Final Fantasy Agni demo, the UE3 Samaritan Demo, the UE4 demos, heck even upcoming games like Watch Dogs, this doesn't impress me much. The last 3D mark I remember being impressed at was 06 I think. Pre-Crysis.Reply